That’s
a heck of a lot of stomach cramps.
One
medical spokesperson on TV advised that if you want to reduce your odds of
getting sick, you should cook all food to an inner temperature of at least 160
bacteria-killing degrees. Also, you should be certain never to leave any
leftovers, especially dishes containing meat, poultry, fish, dairy or eggs,
unrefrigerated for longer than two hours.
After
hearing that, I figured I should have been dead years ago.
Back
when I was in grammar school, I used to carry my lunch, usually tuna-salad or
egg-salad sandwiches, in just a paper bag, not even a lunch box, which I shoved
into my desk. There was nothing to keep
the sandwiches cold. And in May and June the classroom usually was about the
temperature of the Sahara.
My
sandwiches just sat around from the time I left home at 7:30 in the morning
until I finally ate them at noon – way beyond the recommended two-hour “safe”
limit. My lunch should have been so full of live bacteria by the time I ate it,
I’m surprised when I sat down in the cafeteria, the sandwiches didn’t leap out
of the bag and dance across the table.
But I never got sick.
Back
then, I also drank eggnog, and when my mom baked cakes, I licked the cake
batter from the beaters, not even caring (or aware) that both contained raw,
and perhaps deadly, salmonella-infested eggs.
Maybe
ignorance was bliss, because once I started hearing about everything that could
contaminate food, I became more and more paranoid. Even back when I first got
married, I used to nag my husband about what he ate.
“Any
pizza left?” he’d ask me.
“Yes,
but it was left out on the table for two hours and five minutes, so it’s not
safe to eat now. I’m going to toss it out.”
Had
I told him I’d just lost our life’s savings at the racetrack, he couldn’t have
looked more upset.
“Toss
out a perfectly good pizza?” he asked, clearly aghast. “When I was single, we’d
leave pizza out on the counter overnight and then eat it cold for breakfast the
next morning! It never bothered us.”
“Well,
times have changed. That same pizza probably
would put you six feet under today!”
“Well,
yeah,” he muttered under his breath, “because it would be about 5 years old.”
One
newspaper article I read a while back still puzzles me, though. It said that a group of people at some
church picnic all got deathly ill from eating bruised tomatoes.
I’d
never really considered tomatoes to be any sort of potential health threat
before, but after I read that, I found myself carefully studying them for
bruises.
The
problem was, I wasn’t even sure what a bruised tomato looked like. Was it black and blue like a human bruise?
Brown, like on a banana? I noticed a little indentation on a tomato in the
supermarket one day, so I took it over to the produce clerk.
“Do
you think this might be a dangerous bruise?” I asked him. “Or is it just a
harmless dent?”
The
look he gave me told me the only thing he thought was dented was my head.
I
also became wary of fish and seafood after I saw a professional fisherman on TV
who said fresh fish should have no odor whatsoever.
“If fish has a fishy odor or even worse, it
smells like ammonia, it’s old!” he said. “Don’t eat it!”
After
that, I sniffed so many fish, I felt like an otter. Whenever I ordered seafood in a restaurant, I’d immediately stick
my nose in it…and thoroughly embarrass my husband.
But
the food that concerns me the most is chicken.
I blame a TV chef who was preparing chicken-cordon-bleu one night on his
cooking show.
“After
you handle raw chicken,” he said, “be sure to thoroughly wash your hands right
away. Also, wash the counter, the dish you put the raw chicken on, and anything
else that might have come in contact with it.
And then, wash everything all over again! You can’t be too careful with
chicken!”
I
love chicken. In fact, I eat boneless, skinless, organic chicken at least six
times a week. However, I feel as if I should be wearing a Hazmat suit when I’m
preparing it. And afterwards, I run around with a fistful of disinfectant wipes
and wipe down everything that was within a five-foot radius of the raw chicken
– including myself.
Back
when I was a kid, my dad used to take a whole, raw chicken, hold it up by the
wings and make it dance on the kitchen counter. I would squeal with delight.
Now,
I’d probably squeal with terror, imagining the chicken leaving a trail of a
zillion potentially lethal bacteria across the counter.
All
I can say is when I drive by a bunch of crows eating road-kill along the side
of the road, I find myself wondering why they can eat stuff that’s been out in the
hot sun for days, yet they don’t keel over afterwards. I also find myself
wishing I could find out exactly what’s in crows’ digestive tracts that
protects them from getting sick. Whatever is it is, I would love to manufacture
it for humans to inject, so we’d never have to worry about getting sick from
food again.
I’m
pretty sure there are at least 76 million people who would be willing to pay me
good money for it.
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